


Something of the Moon - Chapter 1

by chr1711



Category: L'Écume des Jours | Froth on the Daydream - Boris Vian, Tanguy and Laverdure, Tintin - All Media Types
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-01
Updated: 2015-09-01
Packaged: 2018-04-18 11:42:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4704806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chr1711/pseuds/chr1711
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mysterious things are detected in the sea. They are investigated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something of the Moon - Chapter 1

Something of the Moon

One day Tintin woke up in the bed she shared with her faithful dog WOOAH, which came one day from the surface of an orange planet but which seemed, mostly, to be nothing more than an Earthly dog, which dug and lived in a pit in the Crau in southern France, to which it returned whenever it could do so, the plucky WOOAH who ignored completely the juddering temperaments of earthly dogs, even those of Brittany who played harps already ancient when the stones of Carnac were raised.

Upon falling asleep WOOAH reverted to its native form, tentacles casually laid out upon the bed and over the sleeping body of its master.

''Tentacles,'' said Captain Tanguy, head of Pilot Training at an Air Force base in southern France; ''why is it always tentacles'?''  
The saturnine fellow, a Breton despite his dark colouring, possibly the result of a long-ago dalliance of a local girl with a Levantine fisherman, scratched his head and studied the report on his desk. It definitely said tentacles. Quite clear about it. Then there were the pictures.  
Beyond his office window he could see a Rafale jet fighter commencing its takeoff run. The noise of its engines filtered through the tinted triple glazing; there was no point trying to eliminate all aircraft noise from the outside, and besides, Tanguy thought, it would be counterproductive. The sound was no burden. It connected them to their reason for being there.  
The new aircraft were pretty loud on take off though. The good old Mirages he'd flown since completing his Fast Jet training were being put onto reconnaissance duties: high speed photographic flypasts, high-altitude reconnaissance, and a Mirage 2000 with a couple of SEPR rockets strapped under the rear fuselage like the old IIICs had in the 1960s was good for 30,000 metres on a good day. Up there you could see the curvature of the Earth, and then some.  
And as young Pilot Officer Dutour had discovered, that wasn't all you could see.  
Interesting bird, Dutour. His brother Pierre spent his weekends wandering around their home town of Lyon pleading with immigrants to go home.   
Please, he'd say, wringing his hands at a robed and bearded Muslim, please get out of our country. Please go home.  
By his own admission it never worked but he caused unease among people who began to wonder whether, in fact, they should be in France at all. He called Le Pen a bloody fascist' and claimed that what he was doing was entirely different.  
His other brother, René, was in a secure mental hospital. He'd been working for Medecins sans Frontieres in Peru when he was kidnapped by Maoist guerrillas. Released after two years, he returned home happily to his little suburban house in Arcachon, walked into the living room, and shot his wife twice in the head, fatally. His only defence was,  
“Marriage is a bourgeois concept. I was freeing myself of it.”

Given this family background it was surprising André Dutour had turned out as well as he had. But when he had come into the mess hall blathering about something with tentacles in the sea, something the size of an ocean liner, everyone from the Colonel down thought that he was going the way of his two brothers: a complete and utter nutbag.  
Yet, the camera footage from his Mirage proved it. There was definitely something in the photographs. Something amorphous that nonetheless had a distinct tentacular shape; like the shadow of a huge octopus, rather than the octopus itself, as though you were swimming face down in a clear sea and saw the shadow beneath you flitting across the sand.   
Only this shadow was first photographed from ten thousand metres up, and the pilot had made a rapid descent to look at it closer, so rapid that he was sent to the MO for decompression treatment, and while in the chamber ranted about things that should not be.  
The Dutour family, Tanguy had dismissed it, all bloody nutcases.  
But as he expected, his wife and his best friend automatically took the opposing view. First of all his friend: Ernest Laverdure, recently promoted to Captain also, had seen as much weird shit as Tanguy, possibly more. During their enforced stay in the North African desert he claimed to have seen vast pyramidal structures that moved slowly across the sands like gigantic snails. Preferably, he said, snails in a garlic and white wine sauce. Shadowy tentacular creatures the size of the S.S. France were just par for the weirdness course as far as he was concerned.  
Then there was Tanguy’s wife: Maria, daughter of a prominent Peruvian family, and the only souvenir he'd brought back from their adventures in Peru, she was lovely, practical, and a very good cook. She, also, had suggested that the young man, who had shown no sign of mental aberration before, was worthy of a hearing.  
Look at the photographs, Ernest had suggested. Just take a look, chum. See if young André is telling fibs.  
Tanguy had to admit it: he wasn't. In the pictures, there was a something.  
But what in God's name was it? Or had it nothing to do with any God he'd care to name? Tanguy was not religious, but he rather suspected so.

Tintin walked along the Rue D'Auvergne with her little dog WOOAH. WOOAH had gone back to its doglike form, and snarled at passing cats. Tintin had never before heard a cat vomit but was hearing it all the time now.  
Tintin had a mission. She had to report to the offices of the Institute of Passing Strangers, a secretive organisation whose motto was Pass like the wind.  
“Ah, Tintin,” said Captain Crepiteaux, a big blackbearded fellow, a former ship's captain, who smoked a disgusting pipe and who was often to be found of a night in one of several sailors' taverns, where he would take part in rites learned in the South Seas, where that ancient unhuman priest sleeps beneath the waves, awaiting the night when the stars are right and he will rise to snarf down the souls of hapless humans.  
Some inhabitants of the islands regularly passed too close to those waters, and across the generations they had developed a look that was more fishlike than human. Long faces, exophthalmic eyes, and a certain habit of breathing through the neck. Of course they were keen on the undersea world, and could stay submerged or eight, nine or even ten minutes, beating every record set by human free-divers such as Nitsch, Ferreras or Streeter. But these people are only human and the people of those remote southern islands were something else entirely. Crepiteaux himself had something of the look of the marine people, so much so that people named him after fish.  
And it was this gentleman that Tintin saw as she entered the IPS building. The flanges on his neck were opening and closing rhythmically.  
“Photographs,” the captain said. “Which are in the possession of our enemies. The airforce knows about them, they have pictures of their own taken during flyby reconnaissance.  
“I don't want to go up against the airforce,” Tintin said. “They will kick my arse for certain.”  
“Not for sure,” the captain said. “We must get hold of those pictures, which show certain things that should never become known to humankind.”  
“Impossible,” Tintin said. “We live in an information world. There will be thousands of copies on the internet by now. Besides, security these days is mental.”  
“Not at all,” said Capt. Crepiteaux. “The Airforce is fastidious with information. If you can get hold of the original, you're done.  
“And besides, a certain young pilot needs to change his mind. Or the Airforce needs to stop believing he saw what he saw, which was something he shouldn't have.”  
“That's a bit easier,” Tintin said, “or should I say, less impossible.”  
“Good,” said Capt. Crepiteaux. “That's settled then. Good luck!”  
“Thanks,” said Tintin, leaving.

Tanguy interviewed the young pilot in a corner of the Bar aux Amis, on the base, near the main gate. Getting him on more restful territory seemed like a good idea, though the youngster seemed far from confident, looking around himself from time to time. It was as though he expected someone to come in and tell him to cease and desist, or worse.  
This corner of the bar was quiet, and concealed; at other tables pilots and their girlfriends sat and chatted, and some civilians, probably workers at the airbase, also. Tanguy was well-known enough there that people would leave him alone. He and Dutour shared a jug of local beer.  
“How are the lungs?” Tanguy asked him.  
“Fine,” Dutour said. “The doc said I hadn’t suffered any adverse effects. It isn’t as nasty as sudden decompression, but recompression brings its own problems. Of course Captain Laverdure described twelve different cases of people who’d made sudden descents, and went over their deaths in glorious detail.”  
“He’s like that,” Tanguy said. “But he’s a good fellow.”  
“Oh sure,” Dutour said. “Just got our interests at heart, I know.”  
“He is,” Tanguy insisted. “Once when we were in Peru, Maria and I went to a cockfight. Watching cockerels tearing each other to pieces. Only Ernest thought it was cruel. We were just sitting there enjoying the bloodletting, and he was horrified by the whole spectacle. His heart’s in the right place.”  
“Anyhow,” Tanguy said, pouring beer for the younger man, “you’re feeling allright. So you’ll be able to help me.”  
“Help me?” Dutour asked.  
“Sure,” Tanguy said, smiling. “I’m going to go out over the sea and look for your tentacular creatures.”  
“Oh, you believe me now, captain?” Dutour said. “I thought everyone thought I was mad. I thought you were going to tell me I was grounded. Confined to base, all that.”  
“Far from it,” Tanguy said. “You’re back on active duty from Wednesday.”  
“But you’re going to go and look for it ...” Dutour gaped. “You don’t want to do that, mon capitaine. Nobody wants to do that.”  
“I do,” Tanguy said. “There’s something out there. It’s my duty to go and look for it. I’d be failing in my duty of care for my men - for you and all of you - if I didn’t. I’m going to see if there really is something up there, or whether it’s an illusion.”  
“I saw it, captain,” Dutour said.  
“I know you saw something,” Tanguy said. “I’m just thinking it might have been an atmospheric phenomenon. The shadow of smoke on the sea.”  
“It moved,” Dutour said. “Something in the sea, off the Cap d’Agde. There was no smoke over the area on that day, I’ve checked the meteo records. You’ve seen the pictures, Captain. I’m not mad.”  
“Don’t protest too much,” Tanguy said. “Drink your drink.”

Drink your drink, Tintin thought, lest the drink drink you. She didn’t like leaving Paris. In fact she didn’t like leaving anywhere. Or living anywhere. Since the dog-thing WOOAH had got its claws into him she was assailed with strange dreams, in which a muscular black man with the head of a dog rammed its prehensile penis between the cheeks of her arse. She would wake up with the sheets soaking wet and a freight train running across the girders above her room on the Quai d’Orsay. At night she would lie beside WOOAH and listen to the strange trance of night-time Paris, a miasma of cigarette smoke, old jazz tracks, the sweat of Algerian migrant workers, and something that had paddled (with what?) up the Seine in time immemorial and taken up roost in the belfries of Notre Dame. When he wrote Notre Dame de Paris, better known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo was only hinting at strangenesses that de Maupassant later indicated in his strange story Le Horla (“The Outsider”) where a Brazilian ship brings high weirdness to metropolitan and bourgeois France.  
Tintin had no doubt whatsoever that the strangeness it brought from Brazil was high magic, weird music, and the irresistible Black man.

When she was a little girl Tintin wanted to be a writer. But as she lay beside the dog-creature WOOAH she knew this had gone out of the window when WOOAH crawled in on its invisible tentacles. She would look at her word processor and exclaim remarkably how the keyboard began to squash and deform at her very thoughts. Tintin played with herself, using whatever kind of genitals she had at the time; for why should she stick to one or the other? This the creature WOOAH had taught her. She was fluid, the way the Captain was fluid, but the Captain’s deformation was continuous, one-way, Aristotelian; there was no room for wonder or blunder within it. It had a start, a middle, and a bitter end, like life, if you counted only one life; but Tintin could count many, and start counting at the middle, or the side, or the end, not that it really had an end if you kept on going. Like the American philosopher-king Charles Fort, she recognised that you can measure a circle beginning anywhere. She was sure that when she was a little girl; well, she hadn't been a little girl, she'd been a little boy and lived in a big house and there went out to a life that was always full of adventure. But it was all a long time ago, as though that childhood belonged to someone else entirely. She stared into the mirror and wondered if she should dye her hair - which was currently blonde growing from dark roots - brick red. It seemed appropriate.  
As soon as she got back from IPS she began to pack her bags. 

“De Maupassant,” the Casta Diva once told her, “had the syph. If he was alive now he’d have Aids.” The Casta Diva had cast off her expensive gowns and top billings at the Scala and Carnegie Hall to slum it in jazz clubs, screaming at the top of her five-octave voice with the volume of a squadron of Rafales at takeoff, standing naked in the rain of wonderland, tired and cheated. She had moved to Paris in the wake of several hundred lawsuits for non-appearance and an irate husband who’d wooed her with a Maserati and finally an AK-47. The Casta Diva sang these days where she wanted to, and people were quiet. They definitely did not talk in the stalls when she was on stage; and there was hardly ever a need for a large gentleman in a leather coat, bald head, mirror shades, forever chewing gum, cauliflower ears, to go and ask them very nicely to shut the fuck up or they would find their arse in the Rue de Rivoli and their head on the Quai des Brumes.  
The girl Tintin used to take her sketchbook along to the Casta Diva’s performances, curl up in a seat in her black lace dress, her feet in white sneakers tucked up under her, and try to squeeze poetry out of the screams, sketch with a 4B pencil - the kind architectural power grows out of the barrel of - while the walls and her eardrums rang to the pelting noise and the audience was covered in blood. Meanwhile Tintin used the cover of the CD's performances to do whatever it was she had to do.  
Tintin didn’t get any good ideas but she did get picked up by a black Tunisian oud player who took her back to his apartment in Sarcelles - hardly the romantic Paris of her dreams. She lived there for several months while he lived off whatever she could earn, then one night the dog-god met her by the Seine and said,  
“I wouldn’t go home if I were you.”  
Watching the news on the television in the Bar Aux Trois Chogothes, she learned that her boyfriend had apparently been murdered, though what kind of murderer tears the head off and sticks it into the torn-open stomach, the police weren’t sure. There was also a suggestion that the phrase ‘fuck yourself’ had been taken literally. Several details were missing from the story, or so WOOAH told her, when it trotted towards her in the golden dawn of the Champs-Elysées with something raw and bloody in its mouth.  
It was the dragon’s tooth amulet that her boyfriend always wore around his neck; but bits dripped off it, sticky red bits. The creature dropped it at Tintin’s feet.  
“This was found in the body,” WOOAH said. “I’ve always wanted to say that,” it added, trotting past and heading for a lamp-post to water.

Tintin, sitting in the back of the gloss black Citroen C6, heading for the Mediterranean. The radio is playing and the car drifts along the motorway in perfect spring sunshine, breezing past Audis and Volkswagens and small Renaults like perfectly-dropped lumps of doggy doo. The tinted windows have slid up because when she last looked out of the window she saw a strange creature, dressed in a rubber suit, standing at the roadside staring at her. Someone gave her a lily before she set off and she has it pressed to her breasts like a crucifix. The creature WOOAH is sitting in the front passenger seat making conversation with the driver, a big broad-shouldered fellow who doubles as IPS’s head chef. His name is Nicolas.  
His friend, Colin, is sitting in the back seat alongside Tintin. He is a tall blond man who looks like the guy who played Slim in Hollywood Canteen*. He is wearing a cream linen suit and a black T-shirt under it, and cream leather slip-on shoes without any socks. His hair is brushed back, and Armani shades are shoved back onto his forehead. His wrist bears a slim gold Piaget and the nails are manicured to a tee.  
“I once had a wife,” he says to nothing and nobody in particular. “Back before I went to Bosnia. She died.”  
But everyone knows Colin’s tragedy, and to look into those grey eyes is to see it. Tintin can more than bear to be with him, sometimes she needs to be, because only he understands where she has come from, and she understands where he is coming from also. She wonders if he and the cook, Nicolas, are lovers. It is more than possible – Colin insists on being driven by Nick but it's more than just wanting a driver he knows he can rely on; they seem to come as a pair (so to speak).  
The lily on Tintin’s chest moves and shifts as though it was trying to find something to suckle. She thinks about the weapons she is carrying with her, and the way that most of them won’t hold still in daylight. IPS’s armourers can be very cagey indeed with its operatives, and although Tintin is a good one, even she isn’t let into every secret thing.  
She remembers that night by the Seine.  
“He wasn’t bad to me,” she says, “he never raised a hand to me, never even raised his voice to me. He kept me warm.”  
“You kept him warm,” WOOAH says. “You were paying his bills.  
“There are blood vampires,” it goes on, “and there are life vampires. He was a life vampire. Draining your young life force. Just you wait, before you knew where you were you’d be forty years old, have four cute little brown children by him, and your life would have gone without you having done anything you wanted to. Any damn fool can have kids and live in a council flat, sorry if I sound elitist in saying so.”

*Robert Hutton

“Well, yes,” says Tintin, putting an arm along the back of the seat and ever-so-subtly leaning against Colin, “I suppose that isn't very nice, but it doesn't matter.” She remembers a night after the urgent takedown of a shadowy threat to state security, she and Colin in a store cupboard, tongues rolling over each other’s, then his hands under her shirt, her fingers at his flies, him thrusting urgently into her as her arms locked around his neck and her arse banged against a stack of boxes. When he came it seemed to last forever. When she came, it did, her whole body shuddering in his embrace. It took them a long time to even speak to one another after that, any more than required by the demands of the job, but in the end they did and realised it had not undermined them in any way, and had brought them closer together.


End file.
